efence, so as to make it
more tenable by the number of troops available. The original garrison
was now augmented by the arrival of the Guides, horse and foot. It was
with considerable reluctance that Colonel Meiklejohn, who had himself
been wounded by a sword-cut, decided on abandoning what was known as
the North Camp, a position some distance below and isolated from the
Malakand. This camp had been established both to allow the cavalry and
pack-animals to be near water, of which there was scarcity on the
Malakand itself; and also for sanitary reasons, so as to keep so large a
number of animals out of a restricted area. The abandonment of this
camp, necessary though it was, undoubtedly had an extraordinarily
heartening effect on the enemy. All night they had fought desperately,
and lost heavily, without apparently gaining any result; but the
retirement of the troops from the North Camp, besides leaving in their
hands the large tents and heavy baggage of all sorts, impossible to move
at short notice, showed that the garrison also had felt the stress of
battle.

Strongly reinforced, and with new heart, so soon as night fell the
tribesmen renewed their attack. As illustrating the desperate nature of
the fighting, out of one picquet of twenty-five men of the 31st Punjab
Infantry, the native officer and eighteen men were killed or wounded;
while out of another picquet, consisting of the Guides and forty-five
Sikhs, twenty-one were killed or wounded; and all this was done in close
hand to hand fighting. Lieutenant Lockhart thus describes the scene:

It was a veritable pandemonium that would seem to have been
let loose around us. Bands of _ghazis_, worked up by their
religious enthusiasm into a frenzy of fanatical excitement,
would charge our breastworks again and again, leaving their
dead in scores after each repulse, while those of their
comrades who were unarmed would encourage their efforts by
shouting, with much beating of tom-toms, and other musical
instruments. Amidst the discordant din which raged around, we
could even distinguish bugle calls, evidently sounded by some
_soi-disant_ bugler of our native army. As he suddenly
collapsed in the middle of the "officers' mess call" we
concluded that a bullet had brought him to an untimely end.[25]

[25] _A Frontier Campaign_; by the Viscount Fincastle, V.C.,
Lieutenant 16th Lancers, and P.C. Eliott-Lockhart, D